ScyllaDB Founder & CEO Speaks on Revolutionizing Databases and Scaling for the Future

“The best founders turn obstacles into opportunities and setbacks into setups for success.”

HackerNoon: What is your company in 10 words or less?

Dor Laor: The most scalable distributed database in the world.

Why is now the time for your company to exist?

With the data explosion driven by AI and an always-on, always-connected world, databases are stretched to keep up. A faster, more efficient architecture is required to serve petabytes of data in millisecond response time. Your Disney+ recommendation should be instantaneous, your checkout at Starbucks should be flawless, and your Discord chat should be always on.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We’ve built an outstanding team of database professionals. Everybody has a hands-on approach, from engineering to marketing. Our engineers are extremely talented and have an amazing low-level understanding of database, scheduling, networking, and storage technologies.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Since I have built a terabit router, a hypervisor, an OS, and a database, maybe next I’ll proceed to AI engines. But I’m not looking to change domains; we have 10+ years of work here at ScyllaDB.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

The key metric is revenue, but beyond that, there is engineering beauty and the satisfaction of seeing the best brands in the world use ScyllaDB – from Starbucks to Ticketmaster, Microsoft, IBM, and many others.

In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

ScyllaDB offers a highly scalable, real-time database with a single-digit millisecond p99 latency, best in class high availability, and multi-zone, multi-region support.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Having gigantic workloads, such as 10,000 clusters(!) at Palo Alto Networks, the entire Discord messaging database (I have an especially warm spot for them since my son was very excited and proud about this), a 4 petabyte, 180 server workload at China Mobile, etc.

Where do you think your growth will be next year?

Next year we have an exciting growth vector: our new tablet technology, which provides extreme elasticity. Clusters can now grow and shrink in minutes instead of hours/days. It’s a gamechanger for our customers.

Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

Since a database sale cycle isn’t short, we had a 1 year period after our beta release. During that time, we talked with several customers, from Oracle themselves through their Adtech arm, to investing.com and Juniper networks. At the time, I had never sold software before (I was only in pure engineering roles). It was exciting and refreshing to see how a deal came together. Next year, we expect to grow by 40% year-over-year. We have always had strong retention and expansion with existing customers and it is a fairly achievable goal with a mix of new customers.

What’s your biggest threat?

The database market is extremely crowded, but ScyllaDB has a unique, high-end niche. Our challenge is to expand beyond this niche in the years to come.